I was born in Baltimore, USA in 1978. I studied jazz saxophone through highschool and also studied classical sax with my teacher at the Peabody Conservatory.
After graduating I went on to study neuroscience at the University of Rochester. But after four years of studies and six months in Dublin I decided to do this instead. So, I moved back to Baltimore and spent every day for months in my brother’s home studio teaching myself to write songs and record; the end result was the album Before Boston.
In 2002 I left Baltimore to start a band in Boston, The Fifty Mission Crush. We played around the city at places like TT the Bears, The Middle East, Skybar, the All Asia Café, Beckett’s Pub and were even featured at CNC Productions’ Industry Unplugged Showcase. In late 2004, though, I decided to move again, this time to France.
Since arriving in Paris I've moved four times: from the Latin Quarter to Montmartre, then Montrouge and now to Menilmontant.
I don't know exactly why I came, but in the years following September 11th I just stopped feeling like a part of what was going on around me. I remember sitting in a cubicle endlessly reading the newspaper and wondering how it was that so much violence and death was swirling around outside like a blizzard while I just sat there, bored and waiting; I watched as we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and then read about the awful consequences. And as the bloodshed became more widespread, I felt increasingly detached.
The defining image of 9/11 for me was an angry Peter Jennings having technical difficulties while the second tower fell. It was a strange juxtaposition of failing televised choreography and the collapse of hundreds of people into dust. The feeling of that moment never left and ever since things have glowed like a split-screen of normalcy and routine on the one hand and a loop of human suffering on the other.
And of course as the awareness of suffering grows the choreography that dances us away from it becomes more elaborate.
I used to think that I made music despite all of that, but the more I do it the more I believe I make music because of it. I have a poverty of explanations, but there's a poem I like:
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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When I play live it's usually solo on acoustic guitar
